by Peter Weiss
At a meeting in the Party office up on Kungsgatan, Selin had got to talking about his team in the workshop and had mentioned the unskilled laborer who was part of the Czechoslovakian group that had been evacuated from Paris. In the autumn of thirty-eight, before the occupation of Bohemia and Moravia, this man had spent time among the International Brigades. He had surreptitiously pointed me out to Rogeby as I exited the factory. Thus, long before he organized our encounter, he had been aware of my origins, and had waited to feel me out, to find out whether I had since made other commitments. During his last few months in Spain, Rogeby had been a reporter for the Party newspaper and was still working in the editorial office now. Yet he and Selin advised me not to make any contact with the Party for the time being. I was not to expose myself to any risks, they said; I had to continue to abstain from any political expression. Right now it was a matter of just keeping my job in the separator plant. Even if, later, when the time was right, tasks were to be assigned to me, my not belonging to the Party would be an advantage anyway. We had left the café, the snow lay atop the roofs, and on the trees in front of the Piperska Muren, icicles hung from the gutters. Through gray, trampled snow we walked beside the bars to the path on the other side. Here, where the steps led up to the new buildings and scaffolding on the blasted Kungsklippan, Rogeby lived at the foot of the steps in an apartment building. From the window of his furnished room you could see the garden building, which, formerly the seat of the Order of Amarante and the Order of Coldin, now housed a restaurant and a venue for private gatherings. In one hall formally dressed gentlemen were dining by candlelight, waiters in livery served the dishes, speeches were given. Those gathered presented themselves publicly, proudly, with brilliant white shirtfronts, while we, like conspirators, were hiding out in this room with its bourgeois furnishings. That evening we turned our minds to the topic that had preoccupied us in Berlin, in Spain, in Paris, and whose relevance had been revitalized by the recent conference of the German Party at an undisclosed location that was referred to as Bern. Bern, the name a nod to Zimmerwald, was this time a house in the middle of nowhere in the South of Paris. As usual, we had to content ourselves with the meeting minutes that had been condensed down to a few directives. The question had been posed of the extent to which an antifascist front was still possible, and of how it might be possible to activate the internal opposition in Germany and to circumvent the system of surveillance and denunciation. After the failure of the Popular Front in France and in Spain, and after the years of rejections on the part of the German Social Democratic leadership, there no longer seemed to be any of the preconditions necessary for joint action by the workers’ parties. And yet the resolution spoke of the willingness of the masses to come together and transcend party divisions. The number of people in Germany who were resisting the warmongering, it said, was growing. There was even an estimation that the dissatisfaction among the populace could induce a crisis. But with the call for a coalition among all progressively minded forces, the goal of creating a democratic republic liberated from monopoly capital, and an emphasis on the continuation of the struggle for socialism, the reservations of the Social Democrats were bound to surface. The hope for a return to the traditions of the Weimar Republic did not allow the establishment of a unity party as had been suggested by the Communists. For the Social Democratic Party leadership, it was clear that this unity was intended only to secure hegemony for the Communist Party. The political interests of the Party were more important to the Social Democratic leadership than a last-ditch attempt to form a united front. Only a war, they claimed, could remove the National Socialist dictatorship. They chose catastrophe over the risk of entering into an alliance with the Communist Party in which Social Democracy might come off second-best. The Social Democratic fatalism was matched on the other side by the delusion propounded by the Communists that the German working class would now place their trust in the Soviet Union’s commitment to peace. We could only imagine the differences of opinion that must have preceded the resolutions that had been conveyed to us from the outer Parisian suburb of Draveil, and yet we didn’t want to view them as the product of wishful thinking but rather as an appeal to the cells in the underground, to buoy their spirits, to show them that the Party was still intact and capable of action. Even in our hideout on Coldinutrappan we were exposed to the threatening clouds that imperialism had cast over all continents. Everywhere, conversations like ours now had to take place, in which the question was addressed of how we, with our limited strength, our decimated groups, could withstand the plans for annihilation. The social antagonism which had always been clearly visible in Germany, said Rogeby, had largely been muted in Sweden over the past few decades by the hope of the realization of the welfare state. Though the older workers still bore within them the experiences of the great strike movements from the turn of the century, and though there had also been violent confrontations around nineteen thirty, the development was always flattened out by the reforms to the working day. Despite an early, prerevolutionary situation in June of nineteen seventeen, the newly founded Left Party, which later became the Communist Party, was never able to gain ground in this country. The workers stuck to the old party that the unions were attached to, and which, since the fight for the right to vote and the eight-hour day, offered them the guarantee of implementing social and economic improvements. Continually riven by splits and fractures, torn between loyalty to the Comintern and the desire to achieve independence, the Communist Party could at most make suggestions, which, though they indirectly promoted a progressive evolution, didn’t lead to a continual program through which they could gain access to the populace. Even at the elections of nineteen thirty-eight, when it had become clear what kinds of depredations the ruling class were planning, they weren’t able to scrape together a mere four percent of the vote. Over the past three years, many workers had mentioned the events in the Soviet Union as the reason for their mistrust. The economic boom had given them a false sense of security. Criticizing the lack of democracy in the workers’ state, they didn’t see that they were being robbed of their own force of initiative. Weakened by the times of hardship, once the market became stable they allowed themselves to be brought to heel by the industrialists. They had to be focused on retaining the governing position of the Social Democratic Party, and through this, the expansion of what had been achieved to date. But with the accord between the union leadership and the employers’ association a few months earlier, a peace had been produced in which the organizations of the workers and the procurers of labor were described as equal parties, but in which the decision-making power over production remained the preserve of the owners of capital. Under the guise of shared responsibility, economic stability had been won, with the workers abstaining from making use of the means of class struggle. The remains of radical ideology were debased and traded off for a depoliticized popular education. At the round table covered by a lace tablecloth, in the weak glow of the lamp with its parchment shade, we spoke about the continual attempts to portray the intellectuals as a parasitic group and to sever them from the working classes and throw them in with the bourgeoisie. The effect of this manipulation, apparently guided by the intention of foregrounding our autonomy, hampered our ongoing development toward scientific thought. We had been familiar with it since our youth. Particularly the people who grew up in the countryside, said Rogeby, must have seen in educated people a species of human being who wanted to discipline us. The provost, the school teacher, the town doctor, the mayor and the other civil servants, they all belonged to a hierarchy whose upper echelons were out of our reach. In our cramped quarters, our sweaty lodgings, we were left with no alternative but to see the world of art, of literature, as something entirely foreign, hostile. The mere contrast between the modest rooms in which parents and children resided together, and the rectory, the manor, determined the dimensions of our cultural perspective. The longer we remained in our isolation, the more irrefutable the opinion seemed that edu
cation only benefited an elite. Only those who made it into the city at a young age, gained access to libraries, and progressed from simple writings to the works of the classics noticed that there was an intellectual form of labor that was related to the manual, that both activities interacted with one another, supported and advanced one another. And if the influence of anti-intellectualism was growing not only among the Social Democrats but also within our own Party, it was because of attempts to censor things, to keep things from us. None of us deny, said Rogeby, that of those who have acquired a formal education and are able to choose an academic career there are many who are only concerned with their own advancement, who don’t consider us, who never contemplate our disadvantage; but how could we forget that the majority of people whose ideas have been decisive for our struggle came from their ranks. I don’t know what they call themselves, he said, whether they have ever seen themselves as intellectuals. Some came from working families, most from bourgeois households. The only thing that matters is what they made out of their background, the extent to which they have committed their energy to the overthrow of social relations. In examining their works, it becomes apparent which side they are on. The guardians of working culture often say that the intellectuals sit on their high horses, know it all, want to indoctrinate and lead us, while we alone are capable of changing our own circumstances. Such an opinion excludes the idea of an evolution, a maturation, and obstructs the prospect of education one day being made available to all of us. Without this process, it is not possible for the working class to gain an understanding of the tasks that have been bestowed upon them. These do not consist only in contributing to the social and economic transformation of society, but also in participating in a reconception of the means of expression. A reactionary, anti-intellectual streak has crept into our movement. Anybody who disdains erudition and an appreciation of art is opposed to thought. Communist functionaries put up barriers because they are afraid that bourgeois ideology might corrode the revolutionary ethos. Even more damaging is what the leading Social Democrats are doing, for they, entrusted with government posts, have reached a position from which they could promote the expansion of consciousness; they have the workers behind them, could spur them on, provide them with unlimited access to the products of culture. But they are full of fear that intellectual activity, progressive study, awareness of international conflicts, participation in the actual liberation struggle, might break through the barriers they have built up. They may well be for education, but only for education that does not critique the hybrid situation they have manufactured in alliance with the bourgeoisie, this political system and its mixed economy combining remnants of socialism with the capitalist profit motive. Seemingly objective, they stress that, although they have seized the power of the government, the bourgeoisie continues to play the decisive role and that they can therefore only maintain their ongoing efforts at striking a balance. What they fail to mention—but is borne out daily in their actions—is that they have long ago given up their notions of industrial democracy in favor of the capitalist system of production. But for each day that they preserve the country’s neutrality, they can point to the rectitude of their actions, and the workers are forced to agree with them. The years of deprivation are still too close for them to want to risk anything they have won. They know what it means to brace themselves for their dismissal every single day. For them, whose lives hang on the calculation of a few öre of their wages, a new conflict situation would be akin to a defeat. We are also concerned, he said, with keeping our country out of the war that everyone is expecting. But while we’re at it, we are looking into ways that the war itself might still be avoided. The politicians, instead of doing everything to counter the warmongers, now see the war as unavoidable. They have not made a single effort to motivate the Social Democratic International to form a defensive front. They are waiting, like their friends among the German émigrés, like their friends in France and England. They long ago issued their answer to the appeal from Paris. They underline their position with a demonstration. They have invited Scheidemann to Stockholm, said Rogeby, the liquidator of the November Revolution. Tonight, the seventh of February, he’s supposed to hold a talk in the meeting house of the workers’ association, with the revealing title “Between Two World Wars.” The fact that, right now, at a time when two more German Communists, Drogemuller and Bischoff, had been picked up and were going to be deported, the community of workers upon whom it was incumbent to prevent the militant past of Social Democracy from falling into oblivion is opening its doors to the mummy of the former prime minister—the man who had declared the republic of the counterrevolution—was an open declaration of enmity. And yet, said Selin, we must continue our efforts to establish a dialogue. We are reliant upon the support of Social Democrats like Branting, Ström, Wigforss, Undén. Compact defense, he said, from Police Commissioner Söderström to Foreign Minister Sandler. But the concept of the Popular Front cannot be brushed aside so long as there are a few democrats and humanists left, even if we have to force them to give us a hand every single time. This is a reflection of the situation in which we find ourselves. Thus, at this hour, as it was growing dark and the wet trees in the garden glittered under the light falling from the window, the urging and pleading started up again; perhaps it was already too late, perhaps the prisoners had already been handed over to the officers tasked with their expulsion, and they were already on a train somewhere, or a ship, and while we stared out, and as a toast was made over in the ballroom, it was as if the straining of our senses might allow us to make out the cries for help off on the horizon.
